


a light that never goes out

by tongari



Category: Sengoku Basara
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-20
Updated: 2011-02-20
Packaged: 2017-10-15 19:33:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/164214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tongari/pseuds/tongari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An unlikely dialogue between Hanbei and Ieyasu, in which Hanbei is always at least one thousand steps ahead of anyone else, and it is very lonely being everyone else's guiding light. No pairings, just tragedy. Spoilers of sorts for SB3.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a light that never goes out

"Lord Hanbei asked for _me_?"

It was an innocent enough question, delivered with sincerity. Posed to anyone else, such a question and questioner would have likely received a pat on the head, or at least a sympathetic confirmation. But in this instance the unfortunate question was translated - and treated - as a pathetic inability to obey simple instructions.

"Don't make me repeat myself," Mitsunari said.

"I'm sorry," Ieyasu said. "It's just very unexpected."

"Well - Don't keep him waiting!"

With this last warning, Mitsunari waited for Ieyasu to walk up to the doorway he was standing in, and then he shoved the sliding screen just barely wide enough for Ieyasu to step through. Ieyasu looked at the space in the doorway, at Mitsunari glowering to one side of the doorway, head down and shoulders up. He stepped up to the door and put his hand on Mitsunari's shoulder -- Mitsunari shuddered at this touch, as if unaccustomed to the prospect of any human contact less violent than armed combat. Yet he held firm, one skinny shoulder in the way. Ieyasu remembered afterward how sharp this shoulder felt, an accusing knife in his arm, as he ducked through the doorway.

At the end of a long corridor and an even longer, awkward silence between the back of Mitsunari's head and Ieyasu's wistful gaze, Mitsunari pushed a final door aside and announced, brusquely, "He's here--" "Ah, thank you," Hanbei said.

From the door, Ieyasu could barely hear or see Hanbei at all. The room was dimly lit by two braziers on either side of a pale square of quilt-covered mattress, from which Hanbei's voice had, faintly, issued. Out of this darkness Mitsunari's pale form loomed ghost-like, white hands fussing over a tea-tray, bullying the coals into fresh flame with a poker, smoothing the wrinkles from the quilt. Ieyasu stood in the doorway, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He could not hear the faint words Hanbei murmured to Mitsunari, but he could not ignore Mitsunari's heated response of, "What? Leave? _Alone_?"

Hanbei spoke some more. Ieyasu kept his face turned to the doorsill, eyes focused on the grain of the wood, the dust collecting at the corners of the frames, the shadows cast by the firelight dancing acros the paper. Eventually Mitsunari rose from Hanbei's side and came over to the door. Ieyasu risked a glance at him and immediately reeled from the white-hot anger in his face. Yet long after Mitsunari had surged past him and gone stalking down the corridor, Ieyasu stood looking after him, like a child watching the tail of a shooting star.

"Ieyasu?"

Hanbei always spoke his name kindly, even when it was followed by things like 'you really have no other choice, do you'. Ieyasu turned and smiled in the direction of the bed. His eyes had adjusted to the poor light now, he could make out a head lying on a pillow at the end of the quilt and a hand, half-raised, beckoning him. He walked into the room and knelt down beside Hanbei's pillow.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

Hanbei laughed. "How do I look? Don't tell me," he added, as Ieyasu opened his mouth. "Don't speak. Someone is always listening, and you are always so articulate. Let me whisper. Can you hear me?"

"I will lean closer."

"Good.." Hanbei smiled. "Let me give you some advice. It will help you in planning your rebellion."

"Huh?"

"Don't speak. Nod your head. There's a good boy. Listen to me. Don't be overly cautious. You still doubt yourself." Now and then Hanbei coughed, lacing the air with the faint, rusty afterscent of blood. When he collected himself he continued: "You have good plans. I approve. You've chosen your allies well. Just don't trust Mouri. But don't worry about him." For a moment Hanbei's lips twisted in a soft, beautiful smile before he broke into another fit of coughing. "Ah, Mouri, how you will destroy yourself! I almost feel sorry for you. But, no, you will be so cruel to the ones I leave behind."

"You're not leaving us behind," Ieyasu said automatically.

Hanbei looked up into his face. "I wasn't talking about you," he said, still gently. "Now. It all seems very well thought out. Use the Saika for information as much as for firepower. Remember not to trust Mouri. Don't listen to that wandering Maeda vagrant either--"

"Keiji?"

"--and don't repeat what I've said to you," Hanbei continued, with just the faintest of sighs.

He closed his eyes and stretched his head back. In a tangled cloud of white curls, the outline of his wasted face seemed too terribly frail, a sculpture so finely carved it could not possibly support itself for much longer. Ieyasu sat beside him and watched him, and for a long time they seemed to remain suspended in time together, motionless, beyond the reach of both death and life.

Eventually Ieyasu said, "Why...?"

"It would take too long to explain."

"Try."

Hanbei laughed, a grimace etching skull-like shadows into his cheeks. Ieyasu wondered what he had looked like before he took ill. If anyone was even left who had known him in good health; if he had not ended up methodically killing them all.

"You want me to explain," Hanbei said, "why I would aid and abet your plan to overthrow the man I have served to the very last dregs of my life? Ah, yes, you look at me now just as you did when you were a child, when you could not understand how we could let one of our enemies live. Listen, Ieyasu. You used to ask what made me come down from my retreat in the mountains. You remember? Such an insistent child. Always asking."

"I remember."

"That place... I went there so that I could die. Then a man came to me with a dream. And he wanted me to help make that dream come to life. It was such a wonderful dream.."

He opened his eyes, fixed his gaze on Ieyasu's face.

"You have the same dream," he said.

A small smile quivered at the corner of Ieyasu's mouth, as if wondering if it had any right to be there.

"Well. Do you think it is any closer to coming to life, today? What do you think?"

"It's very close," Ieyasu said. "You've done a wonderful job. Only.."

"Only?"

"Our lord will miss you so much."

Hanbei was silent for a long time after. When he spoke again it was to say, "See, when you speak it, it sounds like truth itself. You shouldn't have said it."

"It is true."

"Well. Why do you mention it? Why is it important?"

Ieyasu said nothing.

"What do you fear it will make him do?" Hanbei asked.

"I don't understand," Ieyasu said. His fingers worried the edges of his sleeves. "You would die for him. You are dying for him--"

"We used to talk about all the things we would improve once the country was united," Hanbei said. "Knowing full well I would never live to see it. I would say, we will lay roads here, and these villages we will turn into trade posts.. And he would nod, and perhaps even make me write it down, and we would just look at those maps with our changes marked in them before rolling them up and moving on to the next region we would conquer. In this way his dream already exists in reality. A perfect, united country..."

They were both silent then.

"Well, then," Ieyasu said. "You shouldn't worry so much. If you have already written everything down.."

"What do you think will happen when I am gone, Ieyasu?"

For the first time, Ieyasu lifted his head and looked Hanbei directly in the eye.

"Our lord will miss you," he repeated, "very, very much. I cannot imagine how much."

"More than he will remember his dream?"

"More than anything," Ieyasu said.

Hanbei smiled, and for the first time, too, Ieyasu thought he looked truly at peace.

"You have such capacity for compassion," he said. "You, too, will lose.. I am sorry to have to ask this of you."

"Lord Hanbei," Ieyasu struggled to his feet, fell to his knees. "Please don't, I, I still don't understand. If we just went on, if we all just went on--"

"When I die, Hideyoshi will grieve too much to remember his dream of that perfect country, and if no one capable enough succeeds him - by force, or by inheritance - then I will have failed him," Hanbei said. His voice was very faint now, little more than a whisper into the ether. "Living is good. Life is precious. But life is nothing without dreams. A journey without light. They told me I would die seven years ago. I went to die on a mountain and then I dreamed I found such a brilliant light, I thought it would never go out..

"But it will never go out for me. I will go out before that light. And I have been dreaming for so long.. Mostly good dreams. Very good dreams. I served the strongest of lords, the best of friends.. I watched two boys grow into men." Ieyasu started upon hearing this. Hanbei's eyes were shut now, and the air of finality with which he settled his head back on the pillow suggested he did not plan on opening them again soon. "Yes," he said. "Your plan has only one flaw, doesn't it?"

"Only one.."

"He too, believes in Hideyoshi's dream," Hanbei said. "But he is such a sensitive soul, and it was such a brilliant dream, such a blinding light. Now he can never see anything else... Ah, sometimes I think it is a shame he did not meet you first. You regret this too, don't you?"

Ieyasu winced at the tenderness in Hanbei's voice, the urgency with which Hanbei's hand found his wrist and curled around it while Hanbei said:

"You will be kind to him, won't you? You were always, in your own way, fond of him. Do it as quickly as you can. Don't let him suffer." As Ieyasu struggled with his own voice, failing to find breath, words, Hanbei added, "At least, not for long."

"I won't," Ieyasu said.

He could think of nothing to say after that. Hanbei saved him by releasing his wrist and saying, "Speaking of whom, if you see Mitsunari on your way out, please send him back here. I need to apologize to him."

"What do I tell him? If he asks what we spoke about.."

"He won't ask you," Hanbei said. "Him! Ask you! About what _I_ had to say? I really thought you knew him better."

Taking this final admonishment in silence, Ieyasu rose to his feet, bowed deeply, and left the room, walking very slowly, as if he found it difficult to carry the weight of so many revelations. (Later, in recollection, he would realize that he had not received much in the way of advice from Hanbei at all; only a request, and a confession, and something almost like a blessing.) Several times he stopped and turned to look over his shoulder when he heard Hanbei coughing. As if hoping that Hanbei was calling him back, ready to impart to him one last secret, the last piece in the puzzle, a magic word he could recite to bring a miracle upon the world, the dead back to life, a smile to Mitsunari's stony mouth. But Hanbei did not call him. Thus Ieyasu walked on and on, until in a quiet garden somewhere he found and climbed up Tadakatsu's silent shoulder. There he sat and cried for all the things he had done, and all the things he would do.

*


End file.
